I have three machines on my network (well, more, but only 3 come into play here). Let's call them Alpha, Beta, and Gamma.

Alpha is a firewall/NAT system that also provides a few other services. In this case, it hosts the CVS repository. It has a single 80GB Hard drive, that's about 10% used. It is being used to host the repository so that I can access it (via SSH) from both inside and outside the network.

Beta is a file server, with a 200GB hard drive. We use beta to do backups of desktops and so forth. Beta provides (at present) rsync over ssh and SMB access.

Gamma is my desktop. I have a daily cronjob to copy my home directory to Beta via rsync. Works great.

So my problem is this: I'd like to be able to backup the CVS repository on Alpha to Beta, but I'm not sure how to do this without losing permissions on the files. The files will have all sorts of different owners, using a common group for access. I can only think of mirroring it by having a root cronjob on Alpha tar up the repository and change its ownership to my user, then copying that over to Beta, but that seems a bit of a cludge.

All thoughts are welcomed and appreciated.